Riggy: I’m calling it the Battle of Youtube Shorts Against The Clones That Want to Replace Us!
Danno: Too long, how about “Shorts Wars”?
Danno: Too long, how about “Shorts Wars”?
Riggy: I’m calling it the Shorts Wars!
— Danno Cal Drawings’ video “RIGGY’S CRIMES?”
The Shorts Wars Season 2 Crew. note
Shorts Wars is a webseries/ARG about YouTube Shorts. It's about a group of creators on the platform who make seemingly-normal shorts for a while until a QR Code appears in one of their shorts. Scanning it leads to a message saying they have one week to stop making shorts or they will be replaced.A link to a playlist with all the related videos for season 1 can be found here
, and for season 2 here.
Shorts Wars contains examples of:
- Ambiguous Situation: YouTubers Mogswamp and Knsplash appear in Announcement.mp4 along with Danno, Joe, Jonny, and the others, but it’s unknown if they’re actually part of the ARG. It turns out, while they don’t do anything during season 1, Mogswamp become active during season 2.
- Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking: In "RIGGY'S CRIMES?", the list of crimes Riggy committed include ''these crimes':' 9th degree murder, treason, armed robbery, kidnapping, jaywalking, "jayskipping", "jayflipping", and "being looney".
- Audience Participation:
- In season 2, The Boss creates Discord server and invites the creators' audiences to join via QR codes on their videos. He also uploads "sigma edits" of himself giving motivational talks on his channel, to effectively brainwash the audience into joining his side in the war. This was successful, as many fans now started rooting for The Boss and uploading videos and sending comments onto other videos claiming that he's a good guy.
- The RoyalMelon series on RoyalPear's channel depends on audience participation in the context, that they must choose what Pear must do next by liking one of the unlisted videos shown on the endscreen in a Emergent Narrative style story. The video with the most likes ends up being the next episode in the sub-series.
- Breakout Character: Fan theorists Datchia, RedJet99 and Mello Productions started out as creators posting fan theories. They eventually became really popular amongst the Shorts Wars community, until they eventually started playing in the canon Among Us live streams in the series, and soon they became official characters, with The Boss trying to recruit the 3 of them.
- Cassandra Truth: Riggy, the character that Danno used in his shorts, is unable to tell him about the glitches before it's too late, as he thinks that it's another one of Riggy's pranks.
- Casual Danger Dialogue: In "wheredidriggygo.mp4, Riggy makes jokes even when his clone is about to kill him. Justified, as Riggy had an escape plan that he puts into motion as soon as his clone leaves the room.
- Curse Cut Short: In "RIGGY VS. CLONE RIGGY", Riggy is about to say "motherfucker" at the end in response to him not getting a raise, but is cut off by the end of the short.
- Disproportionate Retribution: Someone is attempting to Kill and Replace some people for making YouTube Shorts.
- Double Agent: The creators and the audience initially believe that cdotkom is a lackey for The Boss, until we realises that he was Good All Along and was actually the one who saved Royal Melon from the explosion using a Pokeball, and let Jonny upload the hard drive into the facility.
- Freeze-Frame Bonus:
- If you pause at the right time, you can catch glimpses of the character that would replace Riggy before they were replaced.
- In some shorts, The Boss leaves text on the screen for brief moments at a time.
- Foreshadowing: "CAN WE CLONE HUMANS?" has Danno say that cloning humans may be possible, but it would be impossible to create a perfect copy. Then, "clones" has RoyalPear talk about "clones" of content creators such as himself appear on TikTok, and every time he says the word clone the video glitches out. Some time after that video came out, clones were created to replace the original creators, but they weren't exactly the same as the original creators.
- Glasses Pull: After blowing up the cloning machine and the second facility in Season 2, the heroes dramatically walk out, with Jonny pulling off his iconic sunglasses, only to reveal a second pair of shades underneath.
- Hypocritical Heartwarming: In "RIGGY VS. CLONE RIGGY", Riggy says that nobody bullies Danno but him.
- Kill and Replace: Clones were brought in to murder the original creators of the shorts, then continue making content as usual.
- Leitmotif: Attack of the Killer Queen from Deltarune frequently plays in Danno's shorts. It gets more and more distorted while Clone Riggy is in place of Riggy. Before Riggy was cloned, however, it was frequently replaced with Pandora Palace, which has the same melody.
- Logging onto the Fourth Wall: clonevpn.com as shown in "Clone_VPN.mp4" used to be a real website, but eventually became unavailable due to Joe shutting it down. It was archived, however.
- Look Behind You: In "facilityplayback.mp4", Riggy distracts his clone from attacking him by saying there's a free tail behind him.
- Medium Awareness: In season 2, all the characters are aware of the unlisted plot videos posted on their channels, including the post-credits scene. They are also actively aware that they are in the "Shorts Wars", like the self-aware fellas they are.
- Meteor Move: In "RIGGY VS. CLONE RIGGY", Riggy hits his clone through the paper background while in mid-air after piledriving him through other shorts.
- Ominous Visual Glitch: The shorts frequently glitch out in creepy ways.
- Only Sane Man: Riggy is the only one aware of the glitches in the shorts.
- Punch-Clock Villain: RoyalPear's clone is only taking over the channel because CloneVPN is forcing him to under threat of killing him. In "wheredidriggygo.mp4, he even admits that he likes RoyalPear, the person he was cloned from, but orders are orders.
- Recycled Script: In-Universe, all of the shorts that advertise Clone VPN use the exact same script, word for word, with only minor changes for things like the discount code.
- Stylistic Suck: Clone Razer's death is far more comedic and low effort than the other clones' deaths. Razer just... punches him, and he becomes a clearly plastic skeleton.
- Taking You with Me: In "the end", after the boss mind-controls RoyalPear's clone to self-destruct, he runs into the boss's room to make him get caught in the explosion.
- Thought They Knew Already: In "HOW TO MAKE A VILLAIN?", Riggy's clone gets mad at Danno for supposedly taunting him in the past two shorts due to the subject of those shorts. Danno genuinely didn't know that Riggy was cloned.
- Too Dumb to Live: Riggy accepts a $20k sponsorship even after Danno points out it's likely a scam. This eventually results in him getting cloned, and then having his clone attempt to murder him in "RIGGY'S CRIMES?"
- Wham Shot: In "End_Credit_Scene.mp4", The Boss is shown to be putting on Jonny RaZeR's iconic outfit at the end, implying it was him behind everything all along.
- Word-Salad Humor: "i now understand the shorts algorithm" has RoyalPear telling a story that slowly devolves into a nonsensical stream of words for humorous effect.
